ins of the orgies.

She was beautiful, too, in her old house of the _Cite_ behind the Gothic
windows, among the noisy students and dissipated monks, when, without
fear of the sergeants, they struck the oaken tables with their pewter
mugs, and the worm-eaten beds creaked beneath the weight of their
bodies.

She was beautiful when she leaned over the green cloth and coveted the
gold of the provincials; then she wore high heels and had a small waist
and a large wig which shed its perfumed powder on her shoulders, a rose
over her ear and a patch on her cheek.

She was beautiful also among the goat-skins of the Cossacks and the
English uniforms, pushing her way through the throngs of men and letting
her bare shoulders dazzle them on the steps of the gambling houses,
under the jewellers' windows, beneath the lights of the cafes, between
starvation and wealth.

What are you regretting? I am regretting the _fille de joie_.

On the boulevard, one evening, I caught a glimpse of her as she passed
under the gaslight, with watchful and eager eyes, dragging her feet over
the sidewalk. I saw her pale face on the street-corner, while the rain
wet the flowers in her hair, and heard her soft voice calling to the
men, while her flesh shivered in her low-necked bodice.

It was her last day; after that she disappeared.

Fear not that she will ever return, for she is dead, quite dead! Her
dress is made high, she has morals, objects to coarse language, and puts
the sous she earns in a savings bank.

Cleared of her presence, the street has lost the only poetry it still
retained; they have filtered the gutter and sorted the garbage.

In a little while, the mountebanks will also have disappeared, in order
to make room for magnetic _seances_ and reform banquets, and the
rope-dancer with her spangled skirt and long balancing-pole will be as
remote from us as the bayadere of the Ganges.

Of all that beautiful, glittering world as flighty as fancy itself, so
melancholy and sonorous, so bitter and yet so gay, full of inward pathos
and glaring sarcasms, where misery was warm and grace was sad, the last
vestige of a lost age, a distant race, which, we are told, came from the
other end of the earth and brought us in the tinkling of its bells the
echo and vague memory of idolised joys; some covered wagon moving slowly
along the road, with rolled tents on its roof and muddy dogs beneath it,
a man in a yellow jacket, selling _muscade_ in tin cup